Limited movie runs: 'Marebito' and 'The Syrian Bride'

Updated 10:00 pm, Thursday, February 2, 2006

MAREBITO

From Takashi Shimizu, who remade his own "Ju-On" as "The Grudge," comes a wigged-out fantasy horror that surely won't be remade stateside. Shinya Tsukamoto (of "Tetsuo" fame) is a video cameraman who becomes disconnected from any kind of reality as he lives through his camera lens. Obsessed with a forbidden vision he's convinced is visible only to those gripped in a helpless state of terror, he goes on a subterranean journey to a Lovecraftian Hollow-Earth realm beneath Tokyo (talking to ghosts along the way) and returns with a feral girl he keeps locked in his apartment like an enormous kitten who suckles from bottles of human blood. Shimizu delivers blood and brutality with a dispassionate directness, giving the unnerving imagery and insidious madness a weird crackle. It's not really scary, but it reaches a level of insanity so unhinged and dispassionately wretched that it defies description. Inspired, but not for all tastes. (Sean Axmaker)

GRADE: B+

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At The Grand Illusion today through Thursday. In Japanese with English subtitles. 92 minutes. No rating, features gory violence and nudity.

THE SYRIAN BRIDE

Bride-to-be Mona (Clara Khoury), a member of the Druze community in Israeli-occupied Golan Heights (her identity card reads "Nationality: Undefined"), has never met the groom. Reason enough for her wedding day jitters, but this day is shrouded in grief: Mona can never return after crossing into Syria. Meanwhile, the wedding is complicated by a political activist dad on probation and a brother cast out by religious elders. Managing every crisis is the smart, defiantly protective elder sister (Hiam Abbass), an ambitious woman in a village all but ruled by a conservative religious cabal. Eran Riklis' hot-button drama feels less written than engineered for maximum internal conflict and external pressure, and only a few of the innumerable characters break out of their prescribed postures. Yet the triumphs still are affecting, the setting is compelling and some of the human moments amid the political circus and culture wars are downright moving. (Sean Axmaker)

GRADE: B

At the Varsity today through Thursday. 98 minutes. No rating, features no objectionable language, violence or sex/nudity. In Arabic, English, Hebrew and some Russian and French with English subtitles.